Monday, September 24, 2012

Today I drove to Santa Maria to pick up
some class materials and to get a parking sticker for my car. While
there, I got gas at one of those huge discount stations. At the exit
toward the main street, a very tanned man with a straggly beard and
unkempt hair stood. His clothes were blue, a pullover blue shirt,
somewhat dirty, and a pair of blue denim pants, also dirty. He held
a sign saying "Homeless, please help."

I don't know anything about this man,
his problems, or how he got to his present station in life. But I do
know that he was a beggar, yes, a beggar. Previous to my return to
the U.S. in 2006, I had seen beggars only in India, an overpopulated,
poor country. But here in the U.S., the richest country in the world
by far, we now have a class of beggars. Is this someone's fault?
Can they be helped? If so, how?

I thought back and the first time I
saw beggars was in Portland, OR, in 1986, during the Reagan
administration. At that time the government closed halfway houses
and other care facilities for the mildly disturbed forcing them into
the streets. Turning a corner my car was intercepted by one of these
and he beat on it, mouthing obscenities.

Pankaj Mishra, author of "From the
Ruins of Empire: "The Intellectuals Who Remade Asia", wrote
in the September 24th edition of the New York Times:

"There is little doubt that years of disorder lie ahead
in the Middle East as different factions try to gain control.
The murder of Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens in Libya, the
one American success story of the Arab Spring, is an early sign
of the chaos to come; it also points to the unpredictable
consequences likely to follow any Western intervention in Syria
— or Iran.
As in Southeast Asia in 1975, the limits of both American
firepower and diplomacy have been exposed. Financial leverage,
or baksheesh, can work only up to a point with leaders
struggling to control the bewilderingly diverse and ferocious
energies unleashed by the Arab Spring.
Although it’s politically unpalatable to mention it during
an election campaign, the case for a strategic American retreat
from the Middle East and Afghanistan has rarely been more
compelling. It’s especially strong as growing energy
independence reduces America’s burden for policing the region,
and its supposed ally, Israel, shows alarming signs of turning
into a loose cannon. "

In the last 35 years American
foreign policy in the Middle East seems to have revolved around two
poles: stability, to keep the oil flowing unhindered; support for
Israel, no matter what. But the Arab spring swept away or severely
crippled the dictatorial regimes through which the Americans worked.
Political change came in Egypt, Tunisia, Yemen, Syria, and, yes,
Iraq. The political climate was especially affected by events in
Egypt, long an American ally, and the cultural leader in the Arab
world - most Arab movies, for example, are made in Egypt. Thus the
sudden upheaval throughout the region has threatened the first pole:
stability. Simply put, if democracy as such comes to the Middle
East, it will mean war with Israel, whom the Arab masses hate and
despise, mainly because it is viewed as a colonial power.

The second pillar of American
Middle East policy, unswerving support of Israel, is undergoing
transformation, if only because Netanyahu is clearly trying to
influence an American presidentlal election. It must be stated here
that the foreign policy goals of the United States and Israel are
not, and never can be, congruent. It is not in the interest of the
United States to fight in Iran. Not only would this be more
destablization, but it would starkly reveal Israeli influence on U.S.
actions. Basically, Netanyahu has said "Let's you and him
fight." Israel does not want another nuclear power in the
Middle East (It possesses an estimated 50 atomic weapons and 3
thermonuclear devices). Of course, Israeli claims that these devices
would only be used in defense. But this is the precise argument that
Iran makes too. And it must be noted that the U.S. does not attack
opponents armed with nuclear weapons - another reason that Iran
quietly cites for its pursuit of A bombs.

As Mr. Mishra states, years of
disorder lie ahead in the Middle East. Keeping the peace and
satisfying legitimate Arab demands for equality and justice will try
the U.S. foreign policy establishment as never before.

Wednesday, September 19, 2012

"[Mitt Romney] seemed to have bought into the warped canard
that some conservatives inside and outside of Congress have pushed:
that the president and Nancy Pelosi were nefariously hooking people
on unemployment benefits so they’d get addicted and vote Democratic
to keep the unemployment bucks flowing like crack."

Whew! It's hard to know where to begin. But the notions above
give the well-off in our society a victimhood, a narrative that can
justify their meanness, their enforcement of public virtue, their
sense of "us (=good)-them (=bad)", their continuance of tax
privilege, their fear of dealing with equals. This attitude is but
another iteration of right-wing fears. In 1935 a Republican slogan
insulted President Roosevelt, his wife, black people and Jews, i.e.
"You kiss the niggers, and I'll kiss the Jews, and we'll be in
the White House as long as we choose." What is the above but
another tired repetition of these ideas?

Tuesday, September 18, 2012

The Social Security system has changed
a lot since its inception in 1935. It was originally intended to
give people at 65, the age of retirement, some money to help with
retirement expenses. No longer would old people be forced either to
work far beyond 65 or forced into destitution. However, in the 77
years the program has changed to a catch-all social welfare system
which now sends money to survivors, i.e. widows and minor children,
and pays those who have suffered some permanent injury or disability
that prevents them from working. The eligibility and size of the
disability benefit is determined by the amount of Social Security
benefits the worker has accrued. Social Security also includes
Supplemental Security Income (SSI) for non-workers and children who
have a permanent disability, i.e. blindness, mental problems,
paralysis. SSI is means-tested, thus someone with a major disability
and low income might receive the maximum benefit for the rest of
their lives.

All this is funded by a tax on workers
and employers based on the total wages of the worker. It is about
4%, which is shared paid equally by the worker and the employer.

Thus, this system supports a very
large social welfare program, from which all society benefits, that
is, our society does not have the lame, the halt and the blind
begging on street corners, as was the case in the late nineteenth
century. For a look at the ravages of sickness, accident, and
unemployment wrought on nineteenth century socity, take a look at
Wisconsin Death Trip, a
compilation of newspaper clippings from Wisconsin newspapers from
1880 to 1900. It is stark and riveting.

However,
the amount beyond which an individual does not have to pay FICA has
been fixed at $110,100 (2012). Thus the very wealthy do not pay for
the programs mentioned above; this burden is left on those below that
income level. It's a very nice perk for the wealthy. They have the
benefit of a functioning society that takes care of the sick and the
disabled without paying for it.

Shouldn't
we abolish this income requirement and tax the wealth above $110,100
to keep these program solvent?

Lastly,
by a Supreme Court decision of 1879 corporations are deemed to be
deathless legal persons who thus are completely protected by the Bill
of Rights and all other laws pertaining to individual responsibility.
They can be sued, pay fines, and sue others as any other individual.
Therefore, shouldn't they have to pay Social Security taxes like
anyone else?

Saturday, September 15, 2012

Our ideas about science and what it can prove or disprove have changed a lot in the last fifty years. It is no longer that solid diamond of truth, uncovered by a nearly endless series of questions, experiments, hypotheses, comparisons and variations. The much-vaunted scientific objectivity (cf. Max Weber) may not even exist. The realities of nature, our mental constructs, are a great deal stranger than we have thought, or perhaps can even imagine.

“Einstein's Theory of Relativity, Heisenberg's Uncertainty
Principle, and Bohr's Principle of Complementarity suggested a
subtler model of truth than classical physics and Cartesian
philosophy put forward. The scientific method had been premised on
the clear separation of the true and the false, the observer and the
observed. In these concepts, they began to blur. They suggested a
model of the world in which what is seen to contingent upon where
you look from, the objectivity of the spectator is undermined,
observation becomes a form of involvement, and no position is
detached.”

“[Heisenberg] went on to say that science is not a description of
nature, but of the interaction between scientists and nature,
“nature as exposed by our method of questioning.” In other
words, science was a conversation whose answers depended on the
questions, and the narrative, the account of the conversation, had
to include the questioner. The pigeonholes which had been so
central to ideals of scientific method could not encompass such a
narrative.”

Friday, September 14, 2012

Last Monday I read a short article in
the New York Times by Kurt Eichwald, author of "500 Days:
Secrets and Lies in the Terror Wars." In it he says that
President Bush was amply warned of the attack of September 11th. The
administration, cynically I think, only released one briefing paper,
that of August 6, 2001, which stated the Bin Laden was determined to
strike the United States. This was the only presidential briefing
that was declassified and released. The Bush administration later
claimed that it had no other information about the attack except this
vague warning on August 6th, no date, no time, no place. However,
that is the nature of surprise attacks: they come at a time and place
no one suspected.

Eichenwald, however, cites information
drawn from classified briefs and other documents: the CIA began
warning the president about a surprise attack by Bin Laden in the
spring of 2001. These warnings continued and continued to be
ignored, despite increasing evidence that an attack was planned..
But neocons withing the administration (is he talking about Cheney?)
claimed that the CIA had been fooled, that the reports were a canard
planted to distract attention from Saddam Hussein and Iraq. Let it
be noted that in the spring of 2001 Iraq was already on the neocon
radar.

On July 24, 2001, the CIA warned
that the attack had been postponed but was still on.

As we know, all these warnings were
ignored.

Now it can be argued, and has been
argued, that the administration was new to office and as such was
deluged with plans, projections, projects, all the bureaucratic
chatter that exists in large organizations. This can be
overwhelming. President Bush himself was not a particulary skilled
politician; his previous experience had been as governor of Texas,
not a singularly difficult job. Then too, the administration was
absolutely determined to "do things differently", to show
the American people that great change had occurred in Washington, the
hated and ineffectual Clinton years were over. The new
administration was determined to go in new directions.

All of the above, in my opinion, are
excuses.

Our elected leaders were put there
to protect us from harm, that is their job, that is what they were
elected to do. All other considerations, political or otherwise, are
secondary. Bush was put there to deal with just this sort of
problem.